Starship Troopers Discussion

When I first saw Starship Troopers at the Theater, I thought it was one of the coolest movies I'd ever seen.

Then the DVD format came out and Starship Troopers was one of the first DVD I'd ever owned; I'd even use the sound from it to calibrate my first Home Theater Digital 5.1 Home Theater system in 1999.

I had nothing to do tonight and I was going through my DVDs and I decided to watch it again for the first time in about 7 years.

Now that I really put some thoughts to it; it's really a stupid movie!!

The humans in it are stupid; they have all that technology yet they go up against Bugs that are armored like Tanks with just plain old machine guns?

There was 2 scenes in the movie I wanted to see more of but NOOOOOO:

1. they bombed the Bugs with fighter-bombers (good strategy);

2. they used rocket propelled mini nuclear warheads attached to the end of their rifles to take out a Bug cave;

Now why on earth did they not use those weapons more often?

Or they should had just bombed the Bug planet back to the stone age from deep space.

Don't even get me started on the no talent cast either!!

1. Bugs that can fart projectiles across the galaxy with deadly accuracy. :roll:

2. Fighting a ground war against armour-plated insects (yeah, Vietnam - I get it, but still). :roll:

3. Neil Patrick Harris was shaping up to be a good little nazi, but no, he's a hero. :suspect:

4. "It's afraid of us! We win!" No payoff. What kind of government sends its surplus yourh off to fight armour-plated insects on their home turf, halfway across the galaxy? There should have been more to that, but no. :x

5. The co-ed shower scene was too short to qualify as the highlight of the movie. :*p*:

I could go on, but I only saw the film once (at the cheap seats, thank God), and I try not to remember it (rather like The Hangover). :evil:

You do know it's all supposed to be ironic, right? It's a satire.

The movie isn't meant to be taken seriously. Watch it as ALIENS meets DR. STRANGELOVE.

I'm a fan of the film BTW.

To me it's a spiritual sequel to ROBOCOP. As in it's awesome.

I need to get into more Paul Verhoeven flicks too.

anyone seen the animated TV series?

I hear it's better than the movie and closer to the actual novel.

j7wild wrote:

anyone seen the animated TV series?

I hear it's better than the movie and closer to the actual novel.

Some would say "To hell with the source material". I say it depends. If you've got a good idea that involves chucking out the source material, that's okay. I like what Verhoeven and Neumeier did.

I haven't seen the cartoon. I have read the book. I would not be opposed to be a more faithful adaptation.

We're actually gonna get ANOTHER direct-to-video sequel, which I only heard of a few weeks ago. It's computer animated, and it's a sequel to only the first film, ignoring the second and third. It's even got NPH.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers:_Invasion

May Netlfix it. Hey, I sat through the shit that was 2 and 3.

did anyone notice the Millennium Falcon stuck to the bridge section of the Rodger Young?

The White Tuxedo wrote:

You do know it's all supposed to be ironic, right? It's a satire.

Yes, I get that. What I'm unclear on is what it's supposed to be satirical of.

I think I'm a reasonably intelligent person, and I've seen Robocop and Total Recall (liked the former, didn't care for the latter) and I recognize the social satire in both, so perhaps I'm still missing something. Perhaps I needed my nose rubbed in the point, because I didn't get it on my own. I just felt that my intelligence had been insulted, having watched two hours of gorefest with no discernable payoff - and it's not like I went in with any expectations (I had the same experience with Showgirls, another Veehoven oeuvre).

The problem with Starship Troopers for me is that it basically only succeeds as satire. What's great about RoboCop is it works on multiple levels -- it can be just a big dumb action movie, but it's also satirical, but then it also tells a great human story. It's on this third level that Starship Troopers fails for me.

And then there's the fact that I'm actually quite a fan of the Heinlein novel as well, and the movie is basically a parody of it, so it's a little hard to enjoy it from that perspective -- it's like the Abrams Trek movie in that sense.

The action scenes are also terrible, so I guess I can't even enjoy it as an action movie. It basically only works on the satirical level. Which is not to say that it's a bad movie, but it certainly ha a lot of room for improvement.

It'd be nice to see a "serious" treatment one day.

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

It'd be nice to see a "serious" treatment one day.

About as likely as Burgess's THE WANTING SEED or the that book I can never remember the name of (IIRC, the premise was that the stupid underclasses breed more than everyone else and take over society. The only solution is to send them on a spaceship to the moon and blow them up), getting filmed in this day and age.

I dunno, BATTLE: LOS ANGELES and ACTS OF VALOR both got made, and both are glorified recruitment videos, so you never know.

What'll never happen is an adaptation of THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS.

I know it's splitting hairs, but it's always bugged me that they never adapted the powered armour given that the novel basically invented the powered armour concept that now fuels half of science fiction media practically.

I just watched:

Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (Video 2004)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367093/

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844760/

2 crappy direct to video sequels to Starship Troopers.

Starship Troopers 3 had the potential to be something with the return of Casper Van Dien and costarring Jolene Blalock;

but the writers/producers decided to F it up with Religion and Christianity subtext!!

If I wanted religion in a movie, I will either go rent a movie that I know has a religious story to start with or go to Church!!

Bastards!!

I give both movies 2/5!!

I took a German guy I used to know to Starship Troopers. He got it all right.

He was virtually frothing at the mouth by the end of it.

I once happened upon one of the sequels. They were unintentionally hilarious, in that they totally missed Verhoeven's obvious satire in the original (right down to the air-head pretty boy/girl casting).

Salomé wrote:

I once happened upon one of the sequels. They were unintentionally hilarious, in that they totally missed Verhoeven's obvious satire in the original (right down to the air-head pretty boy/girl casting).

2 and 3 do get it (they're written by Neumeier, who also directed 3), but they don't do it well.

The main problem I find is that 2 follows a totally different set of characters and then by the time we get Johnny Rico back in 3 he's been promoted to like Uber-Colonel or whatever, so who the fuck cares? The novel and to some extent the book is a bildungsroman, he goes from boy to man so what you want to see next is how the young adult soldier becomes older and more world-weary. Since the new DTV sequel is a direct sequel to the original with Van Diem returning, hopefully we'll see some of that.